Volume 2
(2009)
Faux Histories

In assembling this “faux histories” issue, we call up the Renaissance Wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet. Unlike the curiosity cabinets and the museums that followed, Wunderkammern were the idiosyncratic collections of aristocracy—in which “natural” and artificial objects lay next to each other, rejecting easy taxonomic distinctions. Acknowledging the obvious colonizing impulse behind such collections, we nevertheless hope that these pieces allow for an uneasy coexistence between the campy, the sentimental, the political, and the repulsive—a mobile archive of committed fakeries in print and digital form.
We would like to thank Sharon Carrier, Ed Cohen, and Laurie Joyner for their ongoing support of specs. Particular thanks go to Karen Slater for kindly accommodating us in our daily operations.
—Vidhu Aggarwal